Connections Sessions Evals

I’ve kind of been embarassed to post these despite the fact that I received them a couple of weeks ago. Overall, I’d say they’re very good, and I’m quite proud of them, but one comment still has me upset. Anyway, here we go:

Comments:
• I loved the session. Excellent information presented in a “fun” format.

My comments? What’s not to like? I love how you see the highest speaker score, the average speaker score and the lowest speaker score. This really allows you to place yourself in context to the other speakers (PASS, please take note). Based on this, the only area that I think I need work is on controlling discussions… except I really like to have more discussions, so I’ll just have to watch the balance on this one.

Comments:
• Good session and overview of Performance Point.
• Please have Grant back next year!
• Great examples. Hope these are part of the slides that we will have access to. One of the best sessions at the conference.

Again, I’m pleased as punch by the evals and the comments. Assuming it’s not the week after the PASS Summit again, yes, please have me back next year. I think at least one eval here was mislabeled. Performance Point? Again, comparing my ability to control sessions with the average & max, I can work on this a bit. Now for the embarassment.

Comments
• Very rude to participants.
• Good focus on useful topics.
• Hope you feel better, Grant.
• Clear examples that illustrated the problems and solutions.
• Great examples of common pitfalls to watch out for before there is a problem.

Very rude. This could be three things, only two that are under my control. I did actually have to walk out of this session, right in the middle of it for about 2 minutes because I was physically unwell (and that’s all I’m going to say). If that was how I was rude, I’m sorry, but things happen. But, maybe it was because I joke with audience. I talk about cowboy developers and hyper-control freak DBA’s and stupid support calls, really ignorant management decisions, nHibernate & Oracle. I make fun of all of them. Lastly, it could have been this topic. I’m calling your baby ugly in this one. I’m telling you that using NOLOCK hints, DISTINCT operators, WHILE loops & CURSORS, and any number of other silly crutches are hurting your performance and making it necessary to tune queries when they should just be written correctly to begin with. It’s one of these three. If it’s one of the two I can control, I’d sure like to do better. I’m frankly bothered by this.

This was my lowest eval of the three and I’m just bummed because I put the most work into this session. Still, it appears it was helpful for the majority of the audience, so I’d say it was successful, but that “rude” comment stings a bit.

That was my Connections conference. I did enjoy presenting there and I hope I get invited another time. I mentioned it before, but I’ll say it again, having the high, low & average so that you can compare your performance to others really makes these much more useful.